I hope it's a good night

When I tell people I’m from New York, everyone thinks of the city.

I’m not from the city. I’ve never been.

I’m from a small town in the middle of a cornfield that’s a little bit south of a different city that sits on the edge of a relatively large lake, and that lake is the only thing, geographically speaking, that is between us and Canada. Personally, I’ve always liked the smaller lakes, the ones that are named for the way that they look like the fingers of a hand.

I keep trying to explain this place to people I meet on the road. It’s hard to put home into words.

I have very deep roots, there. I’ve never lived anywhere else. I’d hardly ever visited anywhere else in my life – a few places, here and there, but rarely.

My mother remembers that I fully intended to never leave home, to stay in my childhood house and take care of my parents until – well, forever. It’s an old, rambling country farm house on the top of the hill, surrounded by miles of corn fields and soy beans and purple clover.

I love that house. It is perpetually cluttered – entire rooms and drawers and cupboards are filled with stuff that only ever sits there accumulating dust. The living room has south-facing windows to let the light in, and a threadbare couch, and a big black dog. The kitchen smells like coffee in the mornings, and sounds like National Public Radio.

Since my little sister and I have been old enough to have separate rooms, I’ve slept in the attic, with a cat who hates everyone but me. The stairs from the upstairs to the downstairs are painted pink. The kitchen floor has a peeling, checkered pattern of squares that I can almost see if I can close my eyes.

Outside, there are overgrown gardens and fruit trees and pines and a wooden swing and a treehouse and a trampoline, and an Austrian pine tree several stories taller than the house and so big around that my little sister and I together still can’t get our arms around it. In the winter there used to be these drifts of snow as tall as me, and we would dig tunnels through them – my little sister and I, and then go inside for the hot chocolate that we used to make on the stove.

I never wanted to grow up, back then. I never wanted to leave…

There’s a bittersweet saying that you don’t know what you have until it’s gone.

But it isn’t gone. It’s still there. I dream about it all the time. I have been afraid of leaving all my life, and now I am thousands of miles away, and it’s still a part of me.

It will always be a part of me.

And it’s strange, but now that I have left, I am full of a feeling of not being ready to go home yet. I keep having dreams where I wake up at home before I meant to come back, and I miss Europe, I didn’t get to say goodbye to Europe, to this backpacking lifestyle I’ve found, and I want to go back…

And so I’m beginning to think that this will always be a part of me, too.

My mother always grows too much zucchini in the summer.

She’s not alone. There are small towns in the north-eastern part of America where people only lock their cars at night during zucchini season, for fear of opening them in the morning to find a small mountain of zucchini in the backseat. People are that desperate to get rid of them. For some reason, this is something that happens every summer without fail, as if no one remembers what’s inevitably going to happen from the previous year. Maybe it’s similar to the way that women forget the pain of childbirth.

And folks get so very creative with finding uses for the darned things. One of the better ones is zucchini bread, which is more of a loaf-shaped cake than anything else. It’s yellow and sweet with green flecks throughout, best served cold with cream cheese or grilled in butter on the stove.

Somehow my mother convinced me to take some zucchini bread with me, on the plane, in my carry on. For my cousin. I’d already flatly refused to bring a box of pears from the tree in the side yard, just on general principles. I didn’t want to carry them.

But she had stayed up until 5AM baking them on one of the last nights before I left, and it really was an excellent batch, and I imagined that if I somehow survived a plane crash on a deserted island, at least I would have zucchini bread from home. So I agreed.

Flash forward several hours later, and I am trying to pass through security at the Boston airport. It’s always a little scary, letting go of my stuff. I’m standing there on the safe side of the TSA checkpoint, barefoot in my socks, clutching my jacket and shoulder bag under one arm and my boots in the other, and I hear the alarm go off. My backpack has not made it through the checkpoint. At this point, I am getting worried.

And officer beckons me over.

“Is this your bag?”

I nod, frozen.

“Okay,” he says, smugly, walks away. I hear him say something to his buddies about going to get lunch.

Shit.

Was there something I missed? Are they going to take me away for questioning? I hadn’t done anything Wrong, I’d double and triple checked everything the night before…

After a few minutes that felt like forever, another TSA officer, a big, dark-skinned woman with her hair tied back in a ponytail, came to my rescue. She unzipped my backpack, lifted out the paper bag containing my mother’s zucchini bread, and gingerly opened the bag as though it was going to explode.

It was so dense that it has showed up as suspicious looking on the scan.

“Bread,” she said, flatly.

I nodded again, tried to smile. I probably failed.

She returned the zucchini bread to the backpack, zipped the backpack shut, handed it to me, and turned away.

Shaking a little, I carried my stuff to a bench somewhere as far away as possible and put my shoes back on.

What I eventually came to think of as “that f***ing zucchini bread” is the reason they stopped me at every TSA checkpoint from America to Germany. It arrived at my cousin’s apartment a little squashed, the paper bag rumpled. We shared it with her roommates, all of whom liked the story just as much as they liked the cake.

My parents drove me to the airport.

It was early in the morning, and still dark out. I’d taken the compost out to the pile in the back yard, and my boots were wet from the dew in the grass. My dad joked that the compost bin was going to be full to bursting when I got home.

I’d also stopped at Jewel’s grave and said a goodbye and an I love you.

I piled into the back of my dad’s bright red midlife-crisis SUV, with my backpack balanced on the seat beside me. Everything I was taking with me was inside that backpack. No way in hell was I letting it out of my sight for that entire journey.

My parents sat in the front seat. Dad was driving. The sky was getting lighter as we took the expressway north into the city. My stomach was fluttering and my hands shook a little. I was knitting. Tying off the last row of something large and blue that covered my lap, something that had started out as a sweater but hadn’t ended up as one. I hadn’t touched the thing in ages, but the night before I had realized I was ready. I had started it at around the same time that I had decided I wanted to go to Germany, and now, through a strange combination of events, I was going. It was time.

We stood at that gate for a long time, my mom and my dad and I. Three of us in a group hug, and we none of us was about to let go.

As we pulled away, my dad remembered something important. He pulled out his phone, opened his compass app, and turned to face the east. Then he grabbed my hand and centered himself for a moment.

We’re not a religious family, but my parents are both spiritual people. My mother, for example, focused her energy on creating a bubble of white light around the plane for the whole time it was in the air, and I know she was doing that without having to ask.

My dad only calls in the Grandfathers at times when he believes we need them, and this was one of those times.

He turns to face each of the directions in turn, and summons them. It’s a simple prayer, with a different meaning and imagery and kind of support associated with each direction.

“Grandfathers of the east, the direction of new beginnings…” he began, and he asked them to be with me and support me on my journey.

I will never remember all of the words.

“…the animal of this direction of the song sparrow, singing in the new day,” he concluded, and his voice broke just a little. We both started to cry. And then we faced the south, and asked for strength. The west for intelligence. The north for wisdom. And so on.

Until it was over, and it was time. I pulled away because if I didn’t do it then I wasn’t going to be able to. And I made it through security. There was almost no line.

I waved goodbye to them, through the glass. I was crying. They were crying. You are crying. We are all crying. And that was okay.

And I then I turned away, Germany bound.

My parents have a vague idea of what country I’m in, most of the time.

The story that I tell people is that I was studying for a while and then I got tired and needed a break, so I ran away from home.

I’m traveling solo around Europe, taking buses and trains from hostel to hostel, staying with strangers, living out of a single backpack, learning how to order coffee in languages I don’t understand.

Right now, I’m in Poland. About a week ago, I wasn’t. About a week ago, I had no idea that I would be going to Poland. About a week from now, I probably won’t be in Poland. But I’m not entirely sure.

I don’t have a plan. I can wake up in the morning and decide where I want to go, what I want to do, how I want to get there. I don’t have to answer to anyone.* And for the first time in a long time, I’m feeling something very close to free.

*Except for my little sister, who wants me back home by Thanksgiving.

I like being able to make mistakes with nobody watching. Which makes it hard when a stranger yells at me in German for biking on the wrong side of the street, or in Polish for walking in the wrong grass in courtyard of a castle, or in Czech for looking at my phone and not watching where I’m going and almost bumping into them. But it’s just a lesson, even if it stings just a little, and I learn.

Traveling is an education in how to operate in this world. How to wash your dishes after cooking, and clean up the kitchen for the next person. What to do if you get on the wrong train. How to ask for help from strangers. How to cope when you get lost in a strange place when your phone is dead and the street signs are written in somebody else’s language and you are completely by yourself. How to worry a little for other people, when you’re sleeping in a room with eight or ten bunks and it’s 8AM and you’re the first one up and the floor creaks like something else, but your mouth feels like something died in there are you desperately want a toothbrush and a toilet and a sink.

Self care becomes a necessity, not an option. For me.

Like, look. You’ve got to sleep, because you’re going to need the energy for tomorrow. You need to eat good food, or your belly will be uncomfortable. You need that fuel so you can walk, so you can think. Same goes for water.

This is why, every time I land somewhere new, I immediately hit up a grocery store. I didn’t plan on this. It was a rhythm I fell into without thinking. It’s like a game, learning to navigate a new currency and a new language, where the end goal is a bar of chocolate and some onions/peppers/mushrooms/something that is hopefully butter, it looks like it’s probably butter, we’re going with that.

The basics. Where are you going to sleep for the next three nights? How are you getting there? Where does the bus leave from? Where is the free WiFi so that you can find out/make sure of all those things?

I’ve memorized my credit card number, my social, my passport ID.

You learn how to trust people, and how to be careful. Triple checking that you’ve got your passport and your debit card and your keys and charger and phone, on you person or somewhere safe. But at some point, you leave your backpack somewhere unattended in a dorm for a couple of minutes and you just sort of pray that no one will steal anything on the inside of it, and you know they won’t because it’s just clothes and deodorant and shampoo and a toothbrush and the tulips you bought for your mother in Holland anyway, and they all brought their own and are all secretly hoping the same thing about their own stuff.

When you are carrying everything you need with you in a backpack, you very quickly learn exactly what you actually need. And over time, the things you don’t need phase out to make room for the things you do need, but didn’t realize you were going to, when you start to wish you had them.

I don’t need more than like two pairs of pants, but a pair of flip flops for questionable bathroom floors at some of the hostels would be lovely.

It isn’t all about the sightseeing, or where I go, or even the history and culture that surrounds me, even though those things are educational and awe inspiring in their own rite. For me, I think I am traveling alone because of what this lifestyle does for me on a personal level. There’s something new and challenging and frustrating and scary and sad and beautiful around every corner. It’s pushing me outside my comfort zone, requiring me to grow, and I am constantly seeking out the things that do that for me.

And because I want to feel free.